A study by grad students at MIT produced this chart describing the average activity on 4chan over a two-week span. Those familiar with the site will not be surprised that it really livens up in the off-hours.

You'll notice the highest volume of posts occur in the midnight hours, while workday hours are relatively quiet. (Due to the rapid turnover of posts, they disappear more quickly when there's a higher volume.) This means either most 4channers have 9-5 jobs or, as was suggested on Twitter, 4channers sleep all day, rising only as the sun goes down to haunt the Internet and troll dead teen's Facebook pages. Vampires!

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Compare the chart above to traffic patterns on Reddit and Digg, which hew more-or-less to the work day (left). How much of 4chan's repulsive culture is due to the fact that it's just a bunch of people up really late on a weekday night with nothing better to do than fuck around on the internet? We're not MIT grad students, but we'll say 40 percent. [MIT (PDF), Reddit and Digg data via Raterush]